


God Spelled Backwards

by OldToadWoman



Category: The Dead Zone
Genre: Angst, Angst and Humor
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2011-09-05
Updated: 2011-09-05
Packaged: 2017-10-23 11:11:02
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Graphic Depictions Of Violence, Major Character Death
Chapters: 1
Words: 16,206
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/249637
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/OldToadWoman/pseuds/OldToadWoman
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>What if the sixth season stuck a bit closer to the Stephen King novels? This is basically a reshuffling of the television source material and the literary source material.</p><p><i>Johnny Smith never got used to having psychic visions, but some were more haunting than others.</i> (Actual word count minus Stephen King quotes = 13,630)</p>
            </blockquote>





	God Spelled Backwards

**Author's Note:**

>   * spoilers: much of Stephen King prior to about 1990  
> 
>   
> 
>   * timeline: after season five as an alternative to season six (television time frame as opposed to King's 1970's)  
> 
>   
> 
>   * setting: Cleaves Mills in Castle County, Maine (the smallest county in Maine per Stephen King) with its county seat in Castle Rock -- as opposed to the television setting of the real Penobscot County with its county seat in Bangor. Stephen King's Maine always strikes me as Mayberry-on-Acid and I think it works best within that small-town atmosphere.  
> 
>   
> 
>   * characters: Reverend Purdy is a creation of the television show, something of an amalgam of all the crackpot preachers that Vera Smith gave money to over the years. Walt Bannerman is the TV show's combination of Sheriff George Bannerman and lawyer Walt Hazlet (Bannerman being the more interesting character and Hazlet being the guy Sarah married). Bruce Lewis is original to the television series with no direct parallel in King's work and the series once showed an alternate version of events where Bruce and Johnny never met and, without Bruce as a best friend, Johnny followed the book's darker path. I'm fond of the idea that Bruce is the one who keeps Johnny grounded and sane. Ditto for J.J. Bannerman. (In the novel, Sarah had a child with Hazlet, not Johnny.) "Spider" and "Danny" are names I just made up because I needed a couple of extras at those points in the plot. Otis the Drunk is a reference to the old _Andy Griffith Show_. **All** other characters in this story are entirely the creations of Stephen King and that includes the dog, the bunny, and the kid in the snowsuit.
>   
>  


>     He was alone now, walking down this gloomy and deserted hall of shadows. And it began to seem to him that it wasn't an illusion or a mirage or a dream—at least not of the ordinary kind. It was as if he had entered limbo, a weird conduit between the land of the living and that of the dead. But toward which end was he moving?  
>      After awhile, the hallway began to seem brighter. At first he thought it was imagination, a sort of dream within a dream if that were possible, but after an unknown length of time the brightness became too marked to be an illusion. The whole experience of the corridor seemed to become less dreamlike. The walls drew back until he could barely see them, and the dull dark color changed to a sad and misty gray, the color of twilight on a warm and overcast March afternoon.  
>     Stephen King,  _The Dead Zone_ , 1979

    Johnny Smith never got used to having psychic visions, but some were more haunting than others. Some were so real, he couldn't distinguish them from reality. Others were just glimpses through the fog. Some were terrifying. Some beautiful.

    Some visions were accompanied by a sense of urgency and some gave him a clear path of what needed changing to make things right and, unfortunately, those were not always the same visions.

    Reverend Purdy had once asked him if he'd ever had a boring vision. The good reverend was trying to make a case for divine guidance behind his visions. If his visions were always important and nearly always afforded Johnny the opportunity to help, even if in just some small way, then surely they must have been sent by God.

    Johnny hadn't been quite so sure about that. "Mysterious ways" felt like a cop-out. Couldn't God be a teensy bit more direct than sending Johnny random visions? It seemed so backward. Without clear historical context, Johnny couldn't even tell if what he was seeing was the past, the present, or a future that could yet be changed. How many times had Johnny been in a panic trying to prevent something that had already happened years, decades, or even centuries before? How many times had he raised the alarm at the wrong time only to have people scoff and be off-guard when the danger finally arrived.  


>    It wasn't even so farfetched to think that God _was_ working through him, although his own concept of God was fuzzy and ill-defined.  
>     Stephen King,  _The Dead Zone_ , 1979

    The only part he could agree with was that he'd never had what he'd call a boring vision. Even when they seemed boring in summary, they never felt boring when they happened. They were always important to someone. He just didn't always know to whom.

    The dog vision was frustrating that way. It was recurring, which suggested to him important, but he never could figure it out. It seemed, on the surface, so trivial. He was tempted to call Purdy and tell him about his boring vision. But it wasn't boring, it was heartbreaking. He just couldn't explain to anyone _why_ it was heartbreaking.

    It was a full-immersion vision the first time. He could smell the grass. The world cartwheeled lazily as the dog rolled. He could feel the sun beating on his fur and it felt so wonderful after such a long dreary winter. A butterfly fluttered at the edge of his vision, but he didn't feel like rising from the lovely cool grass to go after it.

    Then he saw the rabbit. That was different. Rabbits were coded deep in his canine DNA. Rabbits must be chased. He never considered not chasing it.

    The vision lasted mere seconds. When he snapped back to reality, he was clutching Walt's shoulder and nearly lost his balance. Some visions were faint enough shadows that he could live in both worlds, walking and talking in one reality, while seeing the ghosts of another. With a full-immersion vision, his body locked up much like a dreamer in a REM state. Sometimes it took a moment to get his bearings when he "woke" from such a vision.

    "John?" Walt asked, clearly more curious than concerned. Walt had learned to take Johnny's visions in stride. He took them seriously if Johnny said he should, but he never pried. Johnny had obviously had a vision and Walt waited to hear if it was going to be a job for the police or not.

    Johnny let go of Walt's shoulder and considered. He felt indescribably sad and he had no idea why. He'd meant to casually pat Walt on the shoulder as he said goodbye. Two friends passing on the street, no significance there. Touching Walt's shoulder had triggered the vision, so it was Walt or his uniform or both, but Walt hadn't been _in_ the vision so he didn't understand.

    He summed it up briefly. Summer, dog, grass, rabbit. They both shrugged. Walt couldn't think of anything he'd been involved with that had anything to do with rabbits. (Summer and dogs and grass were too broad to narrow anything down.) Even though it was late spring and summer was technically just around the corner, there was still a chill in the air and so a warm summer vision held no urgency. Walt said, "See ya, Johnny," and walked to his car.

    Johnny stood rooted where he'd been when the vision hit. Walt glanced back at him quizzically, but Johnny couldn't explain why the idea of saying goodbye suddenly made him feel like crying. So he smiled an awkward smile and Walt drove away.  


>     "You want to stay away from that place. There are no lightning rods."  
>      " _Johnny..._ " Chuck looked at his father, frightened. "It's like he's having some kind of ... _fit_ , or something."  
>      "Lightning," Johnny proclaimed in a carrying voice. People turned their heads to look at him. He spread his hands. "Flash fire. The insulation in the walls. The doors … jammed. Burning people smell like hot pork."  
>     Stephen King,  _The Dead Zone_ , 1979

    He lost count of how many times he had the vision. It was nearly always the same. Always the dog, the grass, the rabbit. Sometimes he noticed butterflies in the tall grass and sometimes he didn't. A couple of times he caught a glimpse of a building that looked like a barn in the distance, but there was nothing remarkable about it to help him recognize the place or time. No newspapers, no convenient calendars, no vintage cars—no flying cars for that matter—nothing to indicate if this was last year or next year, three hundred years ago or three hundred years in the future.

    The dog had no collar or tags, but that didn't mean it wasn't a family pet. Out in the country, beyond the reaches of animal control, no one would care much if the owners let the license fees slide and only the local vet would care if the shots were up to date. Did all counties even require dog licenses? Johnny had no idea.

    Once—and this was really the only time the vision was frightening—Johnny was the rabbit. He froze in the grass at the first scent of dog, thinking (despite personal experience to the contrary) that the dog might not have spotted him yet. The terror roiled in his furry belly when he located the dog _downwind_ already stalking him. The world blurred by as his legs took control and he bounded as fast as he could through the grass. It was a big dog, a fast dog, and Johnny didn't think he could outrun him. Just as he was about to give up hope, he spotted a hole in the embankment ahead—unknown and itself frightening, but the only escape. Dart, turn, dive, safe. Safe? The hole was dark and deep and full of bats. But the dog couldn't get in. Big dog. Little hole. The dog was frustrated. The bats weren't happy either.

    Johnny came back to himself panting and this time he couldn't stop himself, he actually did cry.

    Walt patted him awkwardly on the back. A second or two passed. "John?"

    Johnny realized he was hugging Walt, had gotten actual tears on Walt's uniform. Bless Walt, he just laughed it off. "John, not in front of Roscoe. Okay?"

    The deputy smirked at them both from his desk. Johnny stepped back and worked at regaining his composure. "Something new?" Walt asked.

    Up until then, Walt had been treating "The Bunny Vision" as a kind of running gag, but he was a good cop and he knew when to stop joking around. (Johnny had to admit the best one was when Walt took out his notepad and, with his serious face on, asked Johnny exactly what kind of grass it was. Johnny, who never joked about visions, actually tried to describe the variety of grass and was completely caught off guard when Walt's next question was about how much of it the dog had been smoking.)

>     "Who's Stillson?" Johnny asked.  
>      Chatsworth laughed. "Oh, you've got to see this guy, Johnny. He's as crazy as a rat in a drainpipe. But I do believe the sober-sided electorate of the third district is going to send him to Washington this November. Unless he actually falls down and starts frothing at the mouth. And I wouldn't completely rule that out."  
>     Stephen King,  _The Dead Zone_ , 1979

    Johnny shrugged helplessly. "Bats."

    "Bats? On a summer day in a meadow?"

    "In a tiny cave in the hillside. The rabbit dove in and the opening was too small for the dog, but it woke the bats up."

    "So, the bunny got away?" It was Walt's serious voice again, but he was also calling it a "bunny" again, which annoyed Johnny for some reason.

    "Yes, the rabbit got away."

    "A happy ending then. Tears of joy?" Walt was still walking that line. This time his voice was light and he was smiling, but his eyes were serious. They seemed to search Johnny's face for some hint that there was a job for the sheriff in this somewhere.

    This vision was getting to Johnny. Walt knew it. Johnny knew that Walt knew it. There was no point in saying any more about it out loud. If only the vision were more straightforward. Why did it make him sad?

    "I'm sorry." Johnny shook his head in frustration. "I don't understand it myself. The vision, what I _see_ of the vision is a beautiful day, a dog playing in a meadow. There's nothing _important_ about it, nothing ominous. At this point, I've had the vision so many times, it _should_ be boring."

    "And yet?" Walt prompted.

    "And yet it's so...melancholy. It's nostalgia for a better day. It's the end of a summer that will never come again."

    Walt frowned. "You've said before that it was the _beginning_ of summer."

    Johnny closed his eyes and tried to sift through all his memories of this vision, all the different versions, different angles. Sometimes he stood in the meadow as an invisible man. Sometimes he watched it like it was on a movie screen. Just that once he was the rabbit. Often he was the dog. A few times he was even one of the butterflies. Despite his years as a science teacher, Johnny Smith only had vague notions about the relationship between season and the angle of the sun. He could sketch it out on a board for the classroom, but he didn't _recognize_ it in the sky with any sense of certainty. But the dog and the rabbit and the butterfly were all certain. It was early summer when the warmth was still welcome. Only later would the heat become an oppressive force to dread. In his vision it was a beautiful day at the beginning of summer. (In reality it was a beautiful day in late spring.)

    Why was he still so sad? Why did it _feel_ like the end?

>     He tried to protest, to tell her that he didn't want to do great works, or heal, or speak in tongues, to divine the future, or find those things that had been lost.  
>     Stephen King,  _The Dead Zone_ , 1979

    Reverend Purdy called Johnny out of town as a favor for a friend of a friend. (A financial contributor, Johnny suspected cynically.) The wealthy man's college-aged son had gone hiking or rock climbing alone out in the Arizona desert without telling anyone exactly where he was going and now he was twelve hours past due returning to his hotel. In another fit of cynicism, Johnny had been tempted to say that if the kid was so determined to earn a Darwin Award, he was welcome to it. But he hadn't actually said the words out loud and instead found himself saying, "Of course. Whatever I can do to help." He soothed his sulky spirit by insisting he wasn't flying out to rescue the idiot, he was going to save the police and volunteers the effort—and very real danger—associated with an unfocused search of the desert. In Maine, summer was just building up enough momentum to be an idea people were looking forward to. In Arizona, summer already had the power of certain death.

    He wasn't even sure why he resented going to Arizona so much until he realized it was about the dog. He felt like he'd failed somehow. He never figured out what that vision had been about and here he was leaving town in search of new unrelated (potentially more useful) visions. He found himself getting angry at the visions themselves. Not the visions of the dog. All the visions. The power of the visions and the capriciousness of them. If Purdy were right—and Purdy was flying him to Arizona specifically because Purdy believed he was right—then he should be able to see past that one moment in the grass that kept repeating in his head.

>     "What I'm trying to say is that the...the knowing is sometimes a pretty limited thing. Because of the dead zone."  
>      "Dead zone?"  
>      "It's like some of the signals don't conduct," Johnny said. "I can never get streets or addresses. Numbers are hard but they sometimes come." The waitress returned with Johnny's tea and chili. He tasted the chili and nodded at Bannerman. "You're right. It's good. Especially on a night like this."  
>      "Go to it," Bannerman said. "Man, I love good chili. My ulcer hollers bloody hell about it. Fuck you, ulcer, I say. Down the hatch."  
>     Stephen King,  _The Dead Zone_ , 1979

    The doctors had talked about a dead zone in Johnny's brain, a nice vague medical term for an inexplicable phenomenon. Johnny found himself thinking of a different kind of dead zone. He had dead zones in his visions sometimes. There were things he just couldn't see. He could see all _around_ them, but sometimes the important bit was in a dead zone, as if the God that Purdy claimed was sending the visions had put his thumb over the camera lens in that one crucial spot.

    Johnny had just enough time before his flight to stop by the sheriff's office. He didn't even try to understand why he had to do so. Lately every time he tried to understand, it just pissed him off. So, he didn't fight it. He just walked in and this time he hugged Walt on purpose.

    He was a good dog. Johnny knew this because the dog knew this. The dog knew it because he'd been told it by his BOY. Dogs only learn the human words that they hear a lot and the dog knew "good dog" which was proof itself that he was one. He didn't want to hurt the rabbit—or the bat—it was just that the _idea_ of "rabbit" and the _idea_ of "chase" were the same idea. (He didn't know the human word for either.) It was not about _hurting_ , which implied a malevolence he simply wasn't capable of, it was about chasing and catching. It was about "rabbit" and what you were supposed to do when you saw one.

    The rabbit was fast and dove into the ground and he followed at full speed, but the hole was smaller than he was. The dog didn't know the words for Pooh Bear, but Johnny did and not a single other time in a vision had he ever felt so much like a cartoon character with his front third wedged in the hole and his back two-thirds scrabbling unsuccessfully to join it. The dog startled the bats and the bats startled the dog. The rabbit didn't get eaten (but his life was short and unhappy regardless) and the dog wandered home to lie in the shade of the barn because it was hot out now. Sun and a thick fur coat and a vigorous chase had combined to make summer less novel and he wasn't sure what bats were but they didn't taste nearly as good as the rabbit surely would have and he was a bit sulky about that.

    Johnny wasn't disoriented at all when the vision ended this time. He didn't cry either. He just shrugged sadly when Walt gave him the questioning eyebrow. "Nothing new. I was hoping I'd figure it out before I caught my flight."

    "Yeah, well, if you have any brainstorms, you call and let me know."

    Johnny nodded and walked away. That wasn't how the visions worked, but he didn't bother reminding Walt of that. Johnny's visions were always triggered by touch. Objects, people, even the ground where events had occurred. The vision of the dog only happened when he touched Walt. He wasn't going to have another such vision until he returned.

>     "It's your sister's medallion," he said to Dussault. "Her name was Anne but everyone called her Terry. Your older sister. You loved her. You almost worshiped the ground she walked on."  
>      Suddenly, terribly, Johnny Smith's voice began to climb and change. It became the cracked and unsure voice of an adolescent.  
>      "Remember me, Terry," the adolescent voice begged. "Stay clean, Terry... please, for God's sake stay clean..."  
>      _"Stop it! Stop it, you bastard!"_  
>      Now Johnny spoke in his own voice again. "It was speed, wasn't it? Then meth. She died of a heart attack at twenty-seven. But she wore it ten years, Rog. She remembered you. She never forgot."  
>     Stephen King,  _The Dead Zone_ , 1979

    In Arizona, he had much more luck and almost immediately. In the young man's hotel room, he had a vision of him studying a map and area guidebook. Johnny was able to nearly pinpoint his location. Within two hours of Johnny's arrival, rescuers had picked up the wayward hiker and taken him to the hospital to treat his broken ankle and, more importantly, the heat exhaustion and sunburn. Johnny couldn't recall a case ever working out so quickly or smoothly. The hardest part had been when the man's father had insisted on shaking Johnny's hand to thank him. Johnny had a flash of what the young man looked like in his hospital bed. He looked as if someone had put him in an oven and started cooking him alive.

    Johnny's hotel suite had been paid in advance and he was invited to stay out the week as a well-earned vacation. But there wasn't a lot to do in the area beyond hiking, golf, and lounging by the outdoor pool. Someone as fair-skinned as Johnny wasn't inclined to do those things even without the recent reminder of the power of the sun. He was thus relieved when Walt called and asked if he could possibly return earlier than planned.

    Walt had his own missing persons case. A woman and her four-year-old son had vanished and there were fears that a vindictive ex-boyfriend had done something ugly.

    Johnny got Walt to fill him in over the phone during the cab ride back to town from the airport. Johnny wasn't an investigator so the facts of the case weren't much help on the face of it, but, as his visions were often frustratingly vague, it would help to know as much as possible up front to help him put the pieces together more quickly.

    In between Walt's first call and Johnny's return to Maine, the police had picked up the vindictive ex and he was definitely a nasty piece of work, but there was still no trace of the missing woman or child. "The husband's in the clear?" Johnny asked. He may not be a cop, but he'd picked up the obvious basics like the significant other is always a suspect.

    "Completely clear," Walt confirmed. "Trenton was out of town on business. Business partner confirms. He was the one who called from New York and asked us to check the house when his wife didn't answer the phone all afternoon. And multiple witnesses saw the wife and boy alive long after he left town, so, no, it was not an elaborate fake alibi."

    "I'm almost there," Johnny said. "Where should I have the cab drop me off to meet you?"

    "I'm out on a wild goose chase," Walt grumbled. "You'll be back in town before I will. Have the cab drop you off at that new cafe. The one with the French name and all the frilly curtains. Give my apologies to Sarah. I'll get there as soon as I can."

    "Where are you?"

    "The woman's car is missing too. We're trying to figure out if the kidnapper ditched it somewhere—which the guy from the Maine Attorney General's office considers to be a big clue—or if it's not actually missing. The husband says a valve had been sticking and he thinks his wife might have taken it out to Camber's to get it fixed. But we can't confirm that because Camber isn't answering his house phone and he lives in the dark ages and doesn't have a cell even though he practically lives out in his barn. So I'm driving all the way out to Camber's place to see if that's where her car is."

    "You couldn't send someone else?"

    Walt grunted. "The Attorney General's hotshot is being a dick. I contradicted one of his pet theories in front of underlings and now he just wants me out of the way while he interviews his suspect. Hence I've been personally dispatched to the middle of nowhere. Just go have lunch with Sarah at whatever that place is called and I'll join you as soon as I can."

    Johnny couldn't remember the name of the cafe either and neither could the cab driver, but they both knew what Walt meant by the new place with frilly curtains. Sarah was sitting at an outside table in the sun. She seemed confused when Johnny Smith climbed out of a cab in front and walked up to her table with a suitcase, but she took it in stride.

>     He spun, sending the numbers into an immediate blur. For a time that seemed much longer than it actually could have been, there was no sound but the whirring of the Wheel of Fortune, the night wind rippling a swatch of canvas somewhere, and the sick thump in Sarah's own head. In her mind she begged Johnny to put his arm around her but he only stood quietly with his hands on the playing board and his eyes on the Wheel, which seemed determined to spin forever.  
>     Stephen King,  _The Dead Zone_ , 1979

    "Hi."

    "Hi."

    "You _had_ to get a table outside?" Johnny asked. He rummaged through the side pocket of his suitcase until he found the sunscreen, which he had been thinking he would need in Arizona and not here.

    "It's beautiful out," Sarah insisted.

    Johnny grunted as he slathered on the sunscreen. "What happened? It was beautiful when I left. I'm gone two days and it turns into the Mojave?"

    "Well, I suppose your vampire blood doesn't respond well to so much sun." Johnny stuck his tongue out at her. "However, as far as I'm concerned, it's a beautiful day to have lunch at a French sidewalk cafe _with my husband_."

    "Oh, right. I'm supposed to apologize for Walt. He said he'll be here as soon as he can. He's working on a case."

    Sarah pulled her cellphone out of her purse and glared at it. "Oh, look. It's working. Bars. Batteries." She tried to glare at Johnny but failed to really pull off the tough-guy look. "And yet he calls _you_ to tell me that he's sorry he's late?"

    Johnny put away the sunscreen and after wiping his hands rather inefficiently on his shirt helped himself to the basket of bread on the table. "I had to talk to him about a case he's working on and as long as we have to meet up, he told me to come here to have lunch with you and kill two birds with one stone, I guess. That's not what I meant!" he added hastily when she huffed at him.

    "The Trenton case?" she asked, curiosity getting the better of her.

    "Mm-hmm," Johnny said around a mouthful of bread and butter.

    "Any leads?"

    Johnny grunted around another mouthful.

    "Johnny, really."

    Johnny waved vaguely with his butter knife and put more effort into chewing. He swallowed and quickly blurted, "I just flew cross country twice in two days! I've been living on airline pretzels and hotel coffee!"

    Sarah laughed and relented. She let him eat two more slices of bread _and_ his salad before she began pestering him for details of the case. It turned out that Johnny didn't know much more than she did and she had a few facts he hadn't heard yet. Namely, the guy Walt had called the hotshot was a bureaucrat with aspirations and was, in Walt's opinion, more of a hindrance than a help and he had instantly nixed the idea of Johnny's kind of assistance so they were going to have to keep it on the down low.

    "Did you say, 'keep it on the down low'?" Johnny asked.

    Sarah frowned. "It doesn't sound stupid when other people say it."

    They had a lovely lunch and were considering the dessert menu and still no Walt.

    "Okay," Johnny suggested. "One more cup of coffee and if Walt isn't here by the time we're done, we split a cherries jubilee and Walt just misses out."

    "Agreed."

    When the police vehicle screeched in straddling two parking spots, Johnny's first thought was that Walt must have an urgent lead for Johnny to check out. When he realized it was Roscoe, he almost joked that Roscoe was going to have to write himself a parking ticket. When he saw Roscoe's face, he realized that something horrible had happened. There were no jokes. There was no dessert.

    "Oh, God," Sarah whispered. "Donna Trenton?"

    Roscoe nodded. He sank into a chair at their table, tears openly streaming down his face.

    "Oh, God," she repeated. "Are they...? Her son?"

    "They, they think she'll live. Good chance anyway. The boy...." Roscoe started picking at his fingernails, fidgeting like a hyperactive child. "The boy was dead already."

    "Oh, no!"

    "So, it _was_ the ex?" Johnny asked. He didn't suppose he cared, but all the other questions he could think of were too gruesome to ask in front of Sarah.

    Roscoe shook his head and looked helplessly from Johnny to Sarah and back. "No. No. It turns out it had nothing to do with him at all. It...God, I don't even know where to start." He began picking at his fingernails again. He seemed to do better when he didn't have to look at either of them. "The fuel valve was sticking and the dealership where they had a service plan was twenty miles away. And Camber is cheaper than anybody here in town, but see, Camber's wife and kid had gone to Connecticut to visit her sister and he'd called the post office and stopped the mail because he and a buddy were...."

    Sarah put her hand on his. "Roscoe, sweetie, you're babbling," she said kindly.

    "No," Roscoe insisted. "It's all important. It's how it happened. She was driving the car out there for service and it stalled, but the road slants right there so she could just coast the last little bit. But she didn't realize that no one was home. She drove all the way out there with her little boy and the car stalled and no one was home. No one but the dog."

>     "And one day this tiger was found in a pit that had been baited with the body of a dead woman. It is a terrible thing to do to bait a trap with a human being made in the image of God...but it is more terrible to do nothing while a bad tiger carries away small children...I am thinking that this Stillson is like that bad tiger with its taste for human meat. I think a trap should be made for him, and I think he should be falling into it. And if he still lives, I think he should be beaten to death." (Ngo)  
>     Stephen King,  _The Dead Zone_ , 1979

    Johnny shivered.

    "If only..." Roscoe sobbed. "If only she'd made sure Camber was home before she drove all the way out there. If only his wife hadn't decided to go visit her sister. If only he hadn't canceled the mail delivery, then the mail carrier would have been out there yesterday. If only Donna Trenton hadn't forgotten her phone. If only Walt...." Roscoe shook his head. "There were so many little unimportant things. If only one of them had been different. If only the dog never chased the rabbit. That's how it started, didn't it, Johnny?"

    "How what started, Roscoe?" Johnny asked desperately. "What happened?" He still didn't understand and he found himself angry with the universe for it. He needed to understand.

    "How did her son die?" Sarah asked. "Who killed him?"

    "No one...it...he...he just died...from the heat, the sun." Roscoe took a deep breath and shuddered it back out. "They got out there and no one was home and they couldn't get out of the car because of the dog and the car wouldn't restart and the sun." Tears flowed down his cheeks again. "A car gets so hot in the sun. Like an oven, you know."

    "What do you mean they couldn't get out of the car because of the dog?" Johnny asked.

    "Out in the country no one bothers to tie up their dogs," Roscoe said as if that were an explanation.

    "That's ridiculous!" Sarah blurted. "I've met the Cambers' dog. He's a big teddy bear. He's a perfectly sweet dog."

    "Good dog," Johnny whispered.

    "I've heard of children dying trapped in cars, but you're telling me this woman— _his mother_ —sat _next_ to him dying just because she had some stupid phobia of dogs?!" Sarah was indignant. A mother couldn't have heard the story and not been indignant. Donna Trenton would have been indignant if someone had told her the story a few days before.

    Roscoe looked Johnny in the eye and whispered, "I'm sorry, Johnny, I don't know how else to explain." He handed Johnny a mobile phone and for a second Johnny thought that there was someone Roscoe wanted him to talk to who would explain.

    And then he heard Walt's voice telling him that the Attorney General's hotshot was being a dick and that Johnny should go have lunch at that place he couldn't remember the name of with the frilly curtains. A tiny part of his mind realized Roscoe had only handed him Walt's phone in the hopes that it would trigger a vision, but the rest of his mind was too busy having the vision to think about Roscoe. Full-immersion, sight and sound and smell and—God help him—touch. The sensation of warm intestines spilling through his fingers was almost as vivid as the pain.

    If Roscoe had expected him to explain to Sarah for him, he had miscalculated. When Johnny snapped back to reality, he barely had time to push away from the table before he was retching onto the sidewalk.

    "Johnny?!" Sarah was horrified and concerned and maybe even a little embarrassed but that part was okay because she was never going to want to eat at this restaurant again anyway. For years to come, just the sight of the frilly curtains would tie a knot in her stomach and at the beginning of summer when they put the tables out on the sidewalk she'd cry.

    "Bats," he gasped out between heaves. "Bats are rabies carriers. The dog hadn't had his shots."

    "Oh, no," she whimpered. "Oh, but, risking a dog bite would have been better than letting the boy die in the car. Anything would have been better than...."

    "Sarah, listen to me." Roscoe grabbed both of her hands. "Rabies is a degenerative disease of the central nervous system. It's excruciatingly painful _and_ it destroys your ability to think clearly. It makes victims mad in every sense of the word. Ferociously angry and insane."

    "But," Sarah couldn't let go of the idea. "You don't just let your son die! You try! You fight! A mother doesn't let her son die without a fight!"

    "She did fight, Sarah," Johnny whispered. "She fought. That dog took chunks out of her and still she fought and when Walt...distracted it, she was the one who killed it with a baseball bat." Johnny sat on the sidewalk in a puddle of vomit and shivered in the sun.

>     When one of the orderlies tried to pull her gently to her feet and lead her away, she bit him. Later this orderly would need to go to the hospital himself for anti-rabies treatment.  
>     Stephen King,  _Cujo_ , 1981

    "Oh, God, I'm sorry," Sarah apologized. "I'm just thinking of myself and I can't even imagine what Walt went through seeing that himself."

    Johnny had a brief flash of self-pity. No one ever appreciated what the visions were like. He didn't need to _imagine_ what Walt went through. He'd just lived it. Where was the sympathy for _him_? But then the moment was over and he knew it wasn't the same. He had _experienced_ it; he hadn't lived it. Living it meant living with the consequences. The visions at least spared him the consequences.

    "Sarah." It was Roscoe who finally pulled himself together enough to tell her. "Walt wasn't expecting trouble. He just went out there to see if a missing woman had left her car with the mechanic before she disappeared. A rabid dog was the last thing he was prepared for."

    "He was a sweet dog," she said again. "Even with rabies, he wouldn't have been vicious surely."

    "Rabies is a degenerative disease of the central nervous system," Roscoe repeated. The conversation was just looping in circles now. "He was a _mad dog_. Sarah," he pleaded with her to understand. "Cujo was _two hundred pounds_ and _rabid_. Walt is dead."

    Sarah laughed. It was that incomprehensible to her that she thought it was a joke and she laughed. And that's how Johnny knew she finally believed it, because it wasn't a funny joke. If she truly thought it was a joke, she wouldn't have laughed. She would have scolded Roscoe for saying something so mean.

>     Two more police cars arrived. Roscoe Fisher was in one of them. When the ambulance driver told him that George Bannerman was dead, he began to cry. Two other policemen advanced on Donna. There was another struggle, short and furious, and Donna Trenton was finally pulled away from her son by four sweating, straining men. She nearly broke free again and Roscoe Fisher, still crying, joined them.  
>     Stephen King,  _Cujo_ , 1981

    But it wasn't _Roscoe_ who'd played the mean joke and Johnny hated the one who had. He passed beyond rage so quickly that he barely noticed it. His hatred wasn't passionate or fiery. It was just a dull cold lump in the center of his chest. He'd found that stupid man in the desert with a single vision, that stupid man who would have deserved what he got. But Walt, who was one of the finest men he knew, why couldn't he save Sheriff Walt Bannerman?

    There was nothing in that vision he could have acted on. Nothing he could have done differently. What could he possibly have figured out from butterflies and a stupid bunny. He imaged that he could hear Walt asking, "The Bunny Vision again?" and he wanted to scream.

    If the vision had just been useful! It would have been so easy to save him, if only Johnny had known. He'd have paid for the rabies vaccination himself if he'd only known before the dog was infected. He could have called and gotten Animal Control out when the dog was still only barely ill. Walt could have gone out the day before (when they still could have saved the boy) with backup and they would have had their guns drawn and been looking for an animal instead of a kidnapper. If Walt had just had his gun aimed low. If, if, if, if, if! Roscoe had said it too. If only Donna Trenton hadn't driven out to the farm without making sure the Cambers were home first. If only Joe Camber had vaccinated his own damned dog. Johnny hated Joe Camber nearly as much as he hated God and he barely even felt bad when he found out Camber was dead too.

* * *

>     "Well, when this ride is going full steam, the little car we're sitting in whips around on its little circular track and sometimes develops up to seven g, which is only five less than the astronauts get when they lift off from Cape Kennedy. And I knew this kid..." Johnny was leaning solemnly over her now.  
>      "Oh, here comes one of your big lies," Sarah said uneasily.  
>      "When this kid was five he fell down the front steps and put a tiny hairline fracture in his spine at the top of his neck. Then— _ten years later_ —he went on the whip at Topsham Fair...and..." He shrugged then patted her hand sympathetically. "But you'll probably be okay, Sarah."  
>      "Hairline fracture!" She shouted at him. "I'll give _you_ a hairline fracture when we get off this, you liar!"  
>      "Do you feel anything giving in your neck yet?" he inquired sweetly.  
>     Stephen King,  _The Dead Zone_ , 1979

    There was a carnival at the beginning of fall, a fundraiser of some kind for the county schools, and Johnny attended out of obligation. (Carnivals still gave him the creeps.) Sarah was there for the same reason. They watched J.J. ride the rides and play the games (except the Wheel of Fortune—Johnny had steered him away from that one and wouldn't explain why and J.J. had nodded like he knew, which was pretty creepy since Johnny wasn't sure _he_ knew why). Sarah muttered something cliché about how resilient kids were while J.J. devoured a caramel apple in the distance, but Johnny couldn't help notice the almost magical way that J.J. and Brett Camber moved past and around each other without ever being at the same booth for more than a fraction of a second. The boys repelled each other like magnets the moment either got close to the other's peripheral vision.

    The boys were better at it than their mothers. Sarah had announced she wanted some popcorn and as she turned, she nearly tripped over the dog. It was one of those tiny things that was more of a rat with delusions of grandeur than a dog. Sarah had developed an understandable fear of big dogs, but this was too small to trigger her anxiety and she laughed and said, "Whoa, there, puppy," as she tried to disentangle the leash from her ankle. And that's when she realized that Charity Camber was at the other end of the leash. Charity Camber walking her dog. Her new dog.

    Johnny took a breath to brace himself and then with a fake smile securely in place, untangled the dog's leash while the two women stared at each other awkwardly. Johnny was getting better about not letting on when he'd had a vision.

    "I'm sorry," Mrs. Camber said lightly, too lightly. She was apologizing for the little dog and its leash. She was apologizing for the silly stupid thing that didn't need an apology.

    They tried—and failed—to make small talk about the carnival, the weather, school sports, but Sarah's eyes kept going back to the glittering metal tags hanging from the little dog's neck. _This_ dog had had its shots. This stupid little dog. Mrs. Camber mumbled "Have a nice day" or something equally inane and disappeared into the crowd.

>     "Take me on the Ferris Wheel," she demanded.  
>      He allowed her to lead him to the ticket booth, where he surrendered another dollar bill. As he paid he told her, "When I was in high school, I knew this kid who worked at the fair, and he said most of the guys who put these rides together are dead drunk and they leave all sorts of..."  
>      "Go to hell," she said merrily, "nobody lives forever."  
>      "But everybody tries, you ever notice that?"  
>     Stephen King,  _The Dead Zone_ , 1979

    There was a horrible silence that could have lasted forever it seemed. He wasn't sure it would help or make it worse, but Johnny finally broke the silence. "She can't apologize," he explained, "because she hasn't forgiven _herself_ yet."

    Sarah shook herself. "I'm being awful. She lost her husband too."

    Johnny decided not to tell Sarah how Charity Camber felt about losing her husband. Like Sarah, she sometimes forgot for a moment and put an extra plate on the table or woke disoriented in the night wondering why the other side of the bed was empty. But when Charity remembered, the emotion that washed over her was relief—no more fear, no more begging. In many ways the Cambers mourned Cujo more than they mourned Joe. Joe was a mean drunk. Cujo only got mean when he got rabies and he only got rabies once. That was Joe's fault too, not Cujo's.

    Life went on.

>     It would perhaps not go amiss to point out that he had always tried to be a good dog. He had tried to do all the things his MAN and his WOMAN, and most of all his BOY, had asked or expected of him. He would have died for them, if that had been required. He had never wanted to kill anyone. He had been struck by something, possibly destiny, or fate, or only a degenerative nerve disease called rabies. Free will was not a factor.  
>     Stephen King, _Cujo_ , 1981

* * *

    "Never mind," Johnny snapped at Reverend Purdy, cutting off whatever condescending words were on his lips. "I said I'd help. Spare me the sermon or I may change my mind."

    He didn't mean it. He never meant it. He couldn't ignore an innocent man in prison any more than he could have left that hiker in the desert. Even when he didn't want to, even when he couldn't see how he could help, he always had to try. He just didn't have to like it.

    Purdy pursed his lips. "I only meant...."

    Johnny tossed the house keys on Purdy's desk. "It was the insurance adjuster."

    Purdy started to speak and Johnny glared and they silently agreed to skip the "Are you sure? How do you know?" portion of the conversation. Purdy finally settled on "How do we prove that?"

    Johnny shrugged and picked up a metal house number and then flung it down instantly. "He's already spent all the cash, but he still has the jewelry stashed in a filing cabinet at his office."

    Reverend Purdy made the necessary phone calls, but Johnny didn't bother to listen. He poked at the keys on the desk without picking them up and got a brief flash. Bad guy in jail. Innocent man freed. Job well done.

    Johnny closed his eyes and slouched back in his chair. Five minutes. Five fucking minutes and no appreciable effort and Reverend Purdy's latest request was solved. It seemed God really did favor pompous asses.

    "Thank—" Johnny hadn't noticed when Purdy's phone calls ended. It was the abrupt stop in his appreciation that got Johnny's attention. He hadn't realized he was crying until he opened his eyes, saw Purdy's questioning look. He admitted to himself with a half-laugh how ridiculous he must look, hugging himself and crying.  


>     When he [Trenton] came outside again, Donna was still administering mouth-to-mouth resuscitation to their dead son. He started toward her and then swerved away. He went to the Pinto instead and opened the hatchback again. Heat roared out at him like an invisible lion.  
>      Underneath the hatchback's floor, where the spare tire was, he found an old blanket. He shook it out and put it over Bannerman's mutilated body.  
>     Stephen King,  _Cujo_ , 1981

    "Is something wrong?" His hand moved toward the phone and hovered there.

    " _Everything_ is wrong, Gene," Johnny answered wearily.

    "Ah." It was amazing how patronizing Gene Purdy could make that one little syllable. All he said was "ah" but "ah" meant "Oh, _that_ again. Haven't I already quoted enough scripture? Reminded you of the mysteries of our Lord's unknowable plan? Don't we have plenty of good works that we could be focusing on now? Can't you just accept that it's over and you can't change the past? Can't you have faith that he's in a better place now? Must you go over it _again_?"

    Johnny tried to picture Walt in his head. Tried to remember his voice. "The bunny thing again?" The memory was already faded, unclear.

    "Johnny," Purdy began and he may have said something else too, but Johnny just got up and walked out.

* * *

    He had every intention of being a hermit, but Sarah wouldn't let him. There was also J.J. to think of, not to mention the baby. Walt had raised his son. It looked like he would be returning the favor. He still avoided Purdy as much as possible and most of the time that worked out okay.

    He bumped into Roscoe and Sheriff Alan Pangborn in a diner one morning. Roscoe waved him over and tried to tell him about their latest case, but Sheriff Pangborn had rolled his eyes at the idea of a psychic and that was fine by Johnny. He agreed to sit and have breakfast with them on the condition that they weren't going to ask him to solve anything and that was fine by Sheriff Pangborn.

>     Alan paused and then added, almost apologetically: "It was written in the victim's blood. If I tell you what it was, will you give me your word that you'll keep it under your hats?"  
>      They nodded.  
>      "The phrase was 'The sparrows are flying again.' Does that mean anything to either of you?"  
>     Stephen King,  _The Dark Half_ , 1989

    Roscoe only made it past three or four bites of pancakes before he tried to change their minds. "No, really. Johnny can see things, things that happened, things that _will_ happen."

    "Uh-huh." (The first time they had met, Johnny's eyes had glazed over and he'd muttered darkly, "The sparrows are flying again." And then he'd shrugged and told Pangborn to avoid antique stores. It had not been the worst first impression he'd ever made, but it had certainly not been good.)

    "It's true," Johnny agreed lightly, stirring ketchup into his hash browns. "I predicted the death of the last sheriff. I had a vivid premonition of a bunny rabbit and based on that incredibly useful vision of the future, we were able to prevent—oh, wait."

    Sheriff Pangborn smiled awkwardly.

    Roscoe sighed and poked at his pancake. "I didn't say you could change everything. I just said you can see things."

>     Once upon a time, not so long ago, a monster came to Castle Rock, Maine. ... He was not a werewolf, vampire, ghoul, or unnameable creature from the enchanted forest or from the snowy wastes, he was only a cop named Frank Dodd with mental and sexual problems. A good man named John Smith uncovered his name by a kind of magic, but before he could be captured—perhaps it was just as well—Frank Dodd had killed himself.  
>     Stephen King,  _Cujo_ , 1981

    "If I see it, I can change it." Johnny hadn't intended to continue. The new sheriff seemed like a nice guy and right now he had that slightly frozen look that came with witnessing a near stranger's emotional breakdown. But the words kept coming out of his mouth anyway. "And sometimes I see it so clearly. Why couldn't I have seen this?"

    Roscoe shrugged. "You couldn't change it so there was no point in your seeing it?"

    "I _could_ have changed it. One phone call to Animal Control. One phone call and I could have saved all of their lives."

    "A fate thing?" Roscoe suggested. He didn't stop eating his pancakes, but he slowed down. Johnny imagined Roscoe was eating his pancakes in a more philosophical way. "Kinda like the Titanic."

    "I don't remember any icebergs last summer."

    "I mean, like the Titanic, it was all coulda, shoulda, woulda. All these things lined up just right—just wrong?—so that it ends in disaster. You can make yourself crazy thinking about what we could have done differently, but maybe all those things lined up just wrong because it was fate and we really couldn't have changed anything."

    "Fate sucks," Johnny grumbled.

    Roscoe agreed and even the new sheriff nodded and, oddly, that made him feel better than any of the reverend's reassurances about God's mysterious plans. Sometimes fate was just a complete bastard.

    "I just," Johnny whispered, almost talking to himself now. "I just keep thinking there was something I was supposed to do."

>     He [Alan Pangborn] scoffed at those people who talked about telepathy and precognition on the call-in radio programs, scoffed in the way people do when hint and hunch have become so much a part of their lives that they barely recognize them when they are using them.  
>     Stephen King,  _The Dark Half_ , 1989

  
    "Shoulda," Pangborn repeated, sipping his coffee.

    "What's the point predicting the future if you can't change anything?"

    "Are you sure you haven't pissed off any Greek gods?" Pangborn asked.

    Johnny ignored him and looked at Roscoe. "What was the good of the stupid bunny vision? Huh?"

    Roscoe didn't even hesitate before answering. "You got to hug him goodbye. I wish I'd hugged him goodbye."

* * *

    Same diner. Same booth. Different day. Johnny liked this diner for a variety of reasons, none of which involved the quality of the food, though, in truth, they burned his meals much less often than he did his own. It was on Route 117 roughly halfway between Cleaves Mills and Castle Rock, which meant that although he occasionally bumped into Pangborn and Roscoe, he never bumped into Sarah (too far out of her way) or Purdy (too low brow) and both the cook and his regular waitress lead uncomplicated lives so Johnny was able to eat most of his meals relatively vision free. It was the next best thing to hiding at home.

>     "Your [physical] therapy will be long and...should I lie to you? Nuh, I don't think so. It will be long and painful. You will shed your tears. You may come to hate your therapist." (Dr. Weizak)  
>     Stephen King,  _The Dead Zone_ , 1979

    Unfortunately, Johnny was enough of a creature of habit that even with his phone switched off, Bruce was able to figure out where he was. Bruce walked in just as his omelet was delivered. He gave Johnny a brief accusatory glance, brief only because he cut it short to order a plate of waffles and a coffee before the waitress could disappear again. Bruce slid into the booth across from him and the accusatory glance returned in the form of an accusatory glare.

    "You are not returning your messages."

    Johnny grunted and poked at his omelet. "You left me a message?"

    "You are also a terrible liar."

    Johnny nodded but didn't look up. He'd been dodging Bruce a lot lately. For weeks really. Well, months, honestly. Okay, pretty much since... Sometimes when you're in a bad mood, you don't _want_ someone to cheer you up. It's just too much work to change gears. And Bruce kept trying. Not in a pushy way, which was good, but in a persistent "I'm here for you, man," way that Johnny found a bit frightening.

    Last weekend, Bruce had inadvertently stumbled onto the heart of the problem. He was being the perfect friend really. If Johnny wanted to avoid the subject altogether, Bruce was happy to watch bad sci-fi movies and make popcorn. If Johnny wanted to hit the bars and pick up chicks, Bruce was _totally_ there. If he wanted to yell and scream, Bruce would listen. He'd yell and scream right back, if that's what Johnny needed. And if Johnny needed a shoulder to cry on, he was there for that too. "You don't need go this alone, man. Don't be too proud to ask for a hug if you need it." And Bruce had smiled lightly and stretched out his arms and Johnny had flinched.

    Because, Johnny realized, that was exactly the problem. He was afraid of Bruce now. Afraid that the next hug or pat on the back would end in visions of, of woodchucks or squirrels or some shit like that.

>     Johnny found himself abruptly wishing himself dead. If this talent was a gift from God, then God was a dangerous lunatic who ought to be stopped. If God wanted Stillson dead, why hadn't he sent him down the birth canal with the umbilical cord wrapped around his throat?...Why did God have to have Johnny Smith do his dirty work? It wasn't his responsibility to save the world, that was for the psychos and only psychos would presume to try it. He suddenly decided he would let Greg Stillson live and spit in God's eye.  
>     Stephen King,  _The Dead Zone_ , 1979

    It wasn't rational to spend less time with the people you were afraid of losing. Sarah kept telling him that. Maybe Roscoe had a point that the one good thing to come from the fucking bunny vision was that he had a chance to hug Walt goodbye. And yet here he was pulling away from all of them. Because it wasn't about Walt really. It was about failure. It was Kate Moore and the heart transplant all over again. Almost every time that Johnny had a vision of disaster, he was able to prevent it. But only _almost_ and not always when it counted most. And still looming out there was Stillson and Armageddon.

    "You know, Bruce, some days I just say to hell with it and try not to care. Everybody dies someday eventually so what does it matter?"

    Johnny was talking about Armageddon. Bruce thought he was still talking about Walt.

    "It's that _eventually_ part," Bruce said. "You can still have a lot of fun between now and eventually. It's always a tragedy when eventually comes before you're done having fun. He was a good man and as much as you can console yourself by saying 'He lived a good life,' the truth is that he could have still lived a lot more of that good life. So it's sad and it's wrong and we all miss him. But you can't stop living _now_ because we all die _eventually_."

    Bruce reached across the table and took Johnny's hand. Johnny didn't flinch this time. He held on to Bruce's hand and stroked a finger along the gray skin stretched over his swollen knuckles. Bruce's arthritis was flaring up pretty bad today, but his sunken eyes still had a twinkle and Johnny looked up just in time to catch the old coot eyeballing the waitress's backside.

    "You better not be thinking what I think you're thinking," Johnny warned him with a smile.

    "I'm just looking," Bruce reassured him. "No harm in looking. It's not like I could ever get away with anything what with you knowing things the way you do." Bruce gave another wistful glance at the young waitress. "Pity though. I think she likes me."

    Johnny snorted into his coffee. "Yeah, well, that's what you get for marrying a psychic."

    Johnny froze the vision. It was a trick that only sometimes worked and he was never entirely sure he could really control it at all. Often he felt like he just got lucky.

    He stared at the elderly men in the booth. That was definitely Bruce. (A quick glance at the parking lot revealed no flying cars at all, but there were a few newer models that he didn't recognize and, even more striking, a rusty old Lexus with a teenage couple making out behind the dirty windshield.) And that was definitely him. He was even older than any of his other future visions, thinner, translucent skin sagging disturbingly off his face...but no scars and the eyes were clear. The world unfroze and the old men continued to tease and banter like an old married couple, which apparently they were. Johnny had seen a lot of unlikely futures. Marriages and families that never happened. He'd watched children who would never be conceived grow up. On the whole, this was not the weirdest thing he'd seen, and the thing that really had his stomach flipping over right now was that he was watching a day decades _after_ Armageddon did _not_ happen.

>     Everything came at him at once, crammed together and screaming like some terrible black freight train highballing through a narrow tunnel, a speeding engine with a single glaring headlamp mounted up front, and the headlamp was _knowing everything_ and its light impaled Johnny Smith like a bug on a pin.  
>      The one image he never escaped ( _as the blue filter began to creep in_ ) was Greg Stillson taking the oath of office.  
>     Stephen King,  _The Dead Zone_ , 1979

    And then the diner faded a bit. Faded and went blue. Blue with yellow stripes. And before Johnny had a moment to reflect on how odd that was, the world ended, yet again. He'd seen it so many times, but it never got easier. Rolling smoke clouds of destruction, a blast wave destroying everything in its path. And then it simply un-ended, reversed and didn't happen. He'd seen that once, too. The blue with yellow stripes blocked his view like a curtain. For an instant he was in the diner again. And once more, it all ended in destruction.

    Destruction, tears...and regret. A memory echoed, a bitter future Johnny Smith warning himself not to save Rebecca. Rebecca had planned to assassinate Stillson once, a plan that would have destroyed her if he hadn't prevented her from carrying it out. You just don't assassinate congressmen without facing consequences. And yet an older wiser Johnny Smith still hadn't figured out a better way.

    "You okay?" Bruce asked. His Bruce, no trace of arthritis in the young knuckles, looking concerned, but not pulling away as Johnny held his hand a bit too tightly. "A vision?" he guessed.

    Johnny nodded. "Visions, plural. Visions on top of visions. It was weird. It was the future. We were old. We were m—" Johnny glanced at Bruce's face and thought better of it. "Miniskirts are going to make a come back."

    Bruce laughed. "About time you had a happy view of the future."

    "Yeah, but you'll be all old and wrinkled so it won't do you much good."

    Bruce huffed. But the mood had been successfully broken. He released Johnny's hand and stirred his coffee. "You are such a killjoy."

    "Yup, miniskirts and blue skies and you stuck being an old married man."

    Bruce looked up. "Married?"

    Johnny nodded.

    "You saw my wife?"

    Johnny smirked.

    "Is she hot?"

    Johnny's smirk smirked. "Did I mention you were _really_ old?"

    "So, she's all old and wrinkly too then?"

    Johnny shrugged. "You seemed happy."

    "Happy's good," Bruce agreed. "I'll take old and wrinkly and happy."

    "Bruce," Johnny leaned across the table to emphasize his point. "I saw us far in the future, but a future very much like the present. My face was wrinkled, but not scarred. No scars, no radiation, no apocalypse."

    "Armageddon doesn't happen?"

    "It did, but it didn't. Overlapping visions, multiple possible futures. In one of those futures, Armageddon is averted. I don't know how, but it was like there was a physical wall between the futures. Blue with yellow lines, it was moving and I couldn't really focus on it. It was more like a curtain than a wall, something very tenuous, this thin fabric between realities."

>     The only clear image in these dream-replays came near the end: the screams of the dying, the smell of the dead.  
>     Stephen King,  _The Dead Zone_ , 1979

    "Blue with yellow lines?"

    Johnny nodded.

    "Fabric?"

    Another nod.

    Bruce snapped his fingers. "The Swedish flag."

    Johnny nodded as he tried to picture it again in his head. "That...makes absolutely no sense."

    Bruce shrugged.

    "You think Sweden is involved in the end of the world?"

    "Hey, it's your vision, not mine."

    Johnny took a bite of his omelet. "Well, if anyone could piss off the Swedes, I have faith in Stillson."

>     As if to prove that old saw about lightning and how often it strikes the same place isn't always right, a number of bad things had happened in Castle Rock over the last eight or ten years—things bad enough to make the national news. George Bannerman was the local sherrif when those things occured, but Big George, as he had been affecionately called, would not have to deal with Homer Gamache, because Big George was dead. He had survived the first bad thing, a series of rape-strangulations committed by one of his own officers, but two years later he had been killed by a rabid dog out on Town Road #3—not just killed, either, but almost literally torn apart.  
>     Stephen King,  _The Dark Half_ , 1989

    Gallows humor. The endless human capacity for denial. Johnny and Bruce had made a habit of making light of the death of millions. How'd the saying go? Ten deaths are a tragedy; ten thousand deaths are a statistic. It wasn't a statistic to Johnny, but it was easier to pretend it was. The most visceral part for Johnny, the most inescapably personal part, was knowing that in _almost_ every vision of the future, he had become bitter and half-crazed. And now he knew that it was possible, somehow, for him to grow old and happy, holding hands with Bruce (an idea that wasn't nearly as freaky as he felt it should have been) and that was worth fighting for.

    If only he knew how. The bunny vision made him sad. The Swedish flag vision was paralyzing. The fabric itself, comically bright, but so terribly delicate. Just one wrong move and the cloth would tear and bleed. ( _Bleed?_ ) This micro-thin membrane separating the end times from happily ever after and he, Johnny Smith, was the one who would...something, something, something...and save the world or fuck it up forever.

    Johnny just wanted to stab a fork into his temple, but instead he smiled at Bruce and continued eating his omelet.

* * *

    The weekend before election day, Stillson rolled through Cleaves Mills on a handshaking tour, tossing out free buttons and bumper stickers and little American flags on sticks for the kiddies to wave in front of the cameras. His visit coincided with the last farmers market of the season, which itself was cobbled together with an antique car club gathering and an art fair, all taking desperate advantage of one last gasp of autumn before winter took over.

    Winter had already put in a few hits. Two inches of snow fell on top of the fallen leaves the night before, but with morning light it had all melted together into mud. A few soggy patches of snow hung on in the shade, but there was only just enough chill left in the air by mid afternoon to warrant the hot spiced cider booth, which was doing a brisk trade.

    Sarah was wearing a pair of pink mittens that looked like giant paws when she waved to Johnny from across the park. Johnny waved back, but didn't approach her. He wasn't here for the hot cider or the pumpkin pie or the classic cars (though there were quite a few really cool ones parked up on the curb with their hoods deliberately up or down so that the owners could show off the rebuilt engines or the custom paint jobs to best advantage). Johnny was here to see Stillson. And to sulk.

    He wanted to believe he was here to think. He certainly needed to think. The vision in the diner had added an extra level of urgency. The significance of it didn't seem to occur to Bruce, but it had had Johnny's stomach in a knot ever since. There were several things about this vision that set it apart from the others. First was the blue fabric with the yellow bits, not the Swedish flag. Johnny had even looked it up, spent ridiculous amounts of time trying to imagine how the yellow stripes might be rearranged if the fabric were folded in a different way, but he just wasn't recognizing it. Second was the taunting vision of a life safely beyond the event.

    Third, and this was the important bit that Bruce didn't catch, _Stillson had not been there_. He had flashed onto a future vision of Armageddon without touching Stillson. He'd gone through his pockets later when Bruce wasn't looking, trying to see if he'd had anything Stillson might have come in contact with, a pamphlet or campaign button, anything. But it was all the same random odds and ends he'd been carrying around for days. He was growing convinced that he himself was now the flashpoint. He had to do _something_. Soon.

    Months later when he had little to do but think, he remembered the key fob that J.J. had made for him last year. Johnny's cellmate thought that was pretty funny.

>     "But to suggest he should be killed..."  
>      " _Politically_ killed," Ngo said, smiling. "I am only suggesting he should be politically killed."  
>      "And if he can't be politically killed?"  
>      Ngo smiled at Johnny. He unfolded his index finger, cocked his thumb, and then snapped it down. "Bam," he said softly. "Bam, bam, bam."  
>     Stephen King,  _The Dead Zone_ , 1979

    Thus Johnny Smith, humanity's last hope, sulked. At one point, Stillson caught his eye and winked at him. Bastard. Johnny squelched through the mud toward Stillson, determined to have this out but unclear in his own mind on whether that meant punching the jerk's lights out or latching onto him and refusing to let go until the visions showed him something _useful_.

    Bruce intercepted him before he even got within heckling distance. "Hey, there." Bruce was smiling casually, but he reached across Johnny with a forearm that might as well have been an iron bar. "Have you tried the pie yet? You have _got_ to try the pie."

    Johnny couldn't get much traction in the mud. Theoretically, neither could Bruce, but it didn't seem to matter as Bruce was a solid wall of muscle pushing him gently but implacably toward the booth with the pies and away from Stillson. As he did so, his fingers gripped onto a particularly ticklish spot along Johnny's flank. Johnny shuddered. He had _no idea_ how he could possibly convince Bruce to get naked, let alone married, but it suddenly seemed like a really, really, really good idea.

    "Man, what has gotten into you?" Bruce demanded in a harsh whisper when he felt he'd finally gotten Johnny a safe distance from the congressman.

    Bruce's breath tickled his ear and Johnny was officially distracted from whatever it was he'd been doing before Bruce had started touching him and breathing in his ear. He begged for a vision then. Please, God, just a _hint_ of how he could make this work. Bruce liked women. Bruce had always been very clear about liking women. This was a very delicate situation that was going to take a bit of finagling and "Trust me, I'm a psychic," did not seem like a particularly effective pick-up line.

    Johnny stared helplessly into Bruce's eyes.

    "Johnny," Bruce said, tilting his head in a way that reminded Johnny of a confused puppy, "you're starting to freak me out a little here."

    "I'm starting to freak myself out a little here too."

    "If I let go of you, you promise not to do anything stupid?"

    _If I promise to do something stupid, will you keep holding me?_

    "Johnny?"

    "Yeah, I'm okay. I just, um, we need to have a private talk fairly soon."

>     Gratitude was not in Sonny Elliman's limited catalog of human feelings, but interest and curiosity were. He felt both ways about this man Stillson. That craziness in his eyes hinted at many things, but boredom was not one of them.  
>      "Who knows where we'll all be in a few years?" he murmured. "We could all be dead, man."  
>     Stephen King,  _The Dead Zone_ , 1979

    The park was full of activity. A lot of it was clustered around Stillson who'd arranged for reporters and cameras to follow him as a walking photo-op as he shook hands with voters. Yet the majority of the people there were ignoring politics and were focused on the cars and the handmade jewelry and knickknacks at the art fair. The upcoming election was just one more sign of time's progression as everyone bustled about to buy the last fresh vegetables of the fading season and the first hot cider of the next. (One booth was already selling Christmas ornaments.)

    And all around and in between, children zigged and zagged, undeterred—encouraged even—by the muddy leaves sliding underfoot. Something like a human pinball game was going on all around them as if Johnny didn't feel dizzy enough already.

    It could have been any child that careened into Johnny's back, knocking him once more into Bruce's arms. He never saw him, not with his eyes, as he and another boy kept flying in a blur through the crowd. But Johnny _knew_.

    "J.J. BANNERMAN!!! YOU HOLD IT RIGHT THERE!! I SAID **FREEZE!!!!** "

    J.J. and his friend Danny froze. The nearest members of the crowd turned to stare. Even Bruce flinched. Johnny did not use The Dad Voice often and even he was secretly startled at how harsh he sounded.

    "Dude, your dad is scary," Danny said.

    J.J. rolled his eyes. Johnny winced. He'd been on the receiving end of the eyeroll a few times lately. Twice, J.J. had pulled the cutting, "You're not my _real_ dad," line on him. He didn't want to hear that again today, but he'd bear it if it came. This was more important.

    "HAND IT OVER!"

    "Hand what..."

    "HAND IT OVER NOW!"

    J.J. sighed in defeat. A psychic parent was _so_ unfair. "It's just a toy. We were only..."

    The crowd lost interest and turned back to the pies and vegetables.

    Johnny stomped forward. His voice lost volume, but absolutely none of its power as he slowly growled, " _It's a toy that is going to get you killed. Hand it over._ "

>     Small-town murder in real life, he had found, rarely bore any likeness to the small-town murders in Agatha Christie novels, where seven people all took a turn at stabbing wicked old Colonel Storping-Goiter at his country house in Puddleby-on-the-Marsh during a moody winter storm. In real life, Pangborn knew, you almost always arrived to find the perp still standing there, looking down at the mess and wondering what the fuck he'd done; how it had jittered out of control with such lethal speed. ... As a rule, a small-town murder in real life was simple, brutal, and stupid.  
>     Stephen King,  _The Dark Half_ , 1989

    And J.J. actually looked scared now, because he knew Johnny didn't joke about people getting killed. "It's just a toy," he repeated as he pulled the gun out of his pocket and handed it to Johnny. Johnny snatched the pistol quickly and slipped it into his own pocket before anyone could see it.

    Bruce gasped. "Is that...?"

    "Just a water pistol."

    "It looks like a real gun," Bruce whispered.

    "I know. That's the problem." Johnny squinted at the boys. "You painted it black?"

    "We were playing Men in Black," Danny explained cheerfully. Danny was not one of J.J.'s smartest friends. "We even filled it full of alien slime."

    "Alien slime?" Bruce asked.

    Johnny licked a sticky finger. "Corn syrup and green food coloring would be my guess. And that," he pointed to a large green splotch on J.J.'s cheek, "is not going to wash off before your Great-Aunt Janie's wedding tomorrow. Have fun explaining _that_ to your mother."

    J.J. groaned and glowered at Danny. The boys started to argue about whose fault this was, but Johnny interrupted.

    "Uh-uh. Boys, I am not done with you yet. Listen to me. You do not play with a toy gun that looks like a real gun. Ever."

    "It can't hurt anyone," the boys insisted in unison.

    "You know it's a toy and I know it's a toy, but there's a lady over there who was mugged by a couple of teenagers last spring, she doesn't know it's a toy."

    "I'm sorry," J.J. mumbled mechanically. "I didn't mean to scare anyone."

    "It only shoots alien slime," Danny protested.

    "And the people who think it's a real gun can shoot back real bullets. Do you understand?"

    J.J. swallowed and nodded. He was a pretty smart kid.

    Danny nodded too, but there was no real glimmer of comprehension. Danny's first attempt at independent thought wasn't going to come until he was thirty-seven and his ex-wife walked out on him without explaining how to work the oven first. It wasn't going to go very well.

    Johnny shooed the boys away. He sighed and turned to Bruce. "Well, that's my good deed for the day. You said something about pie?"

    "Ah, man, you definitely earned pie. You actually saw J.J....?" Bruce couldn't finish the question. "All the pie you want, on me."

    Bruce slung an arm over Johnny's shoulder and gave him a little hug as they walked. Johnny was shaken enough that he barely felt bad about taking advantage of the situation and slipped an arm around Bruce's waist.

    Bruce tried to buy him a slice of pie, but he insisted on buying a whole pumpkin pie as well as a small jug of apple cider and Bruce agreed to share it with him at home later. They needed to talk privately and, vision or not, Johnny was worried about how that would go.

    At one point, Sarah breezed by them. She didn't stop, but flung up her mittened hands helplessly and shouted as she passed, "Alien slime? Seriously? Aunt Janie is going to have a fit!"

    Johnny leaned over and whispered in Bruce's ear. "I met Aunt Janie's groom last night. A green-speckled ring bearer is the least of her problems."

    "Other women?"

    "Gambling and drinking. Her engagement ring is a fake and she's about to loan him another thirty grand to 'start a business' with."

    "Ouch. Can you warn her?"

    "Tried. There's a reason I was uninvited to the wedding."

    "Even after you told her about the ring?"

    "This is wedding number five and he has a cute butt. She apparently doesn't consider the ring to be an issue at this point."

    "Well as long as he has a cute butt."

    "Cute butts don't last forever, my friend."

    "Sad."

>     It was years in the future because Stillson had lost most of his hair.  
>      ...  
>      There was the sense of flying...above scenes of utter desolation that could not quite be seen. And cutting through this came the disembodied voice of Greg Stillson, the voice of a cut-rate God or a comic-opera engine of the dead...  
>      "The tiger," Johnny muttered thickly.  
>      Then all of it, pictures, images, and words, broke up in the swelling soft roar of oblivion. He seemed to smell some sweet, coppery scent, like burning high-tension wires.  
>     Stephen King,  _The Dead Zone_ , 1979

    Bruce gave his shoulder a squeeze and for a glorious moment in time, Johnny was blissfully happy. He watched as Sarah and J.J. drove away and as his eye followed the vehicle out of sight, he found himself staring once again at Greg Stillson. Congressman Stillson was bent over patting a small toddler of indeterminate gender on the head. He/she/it was bundled up in an X-Men snowsuit, muddy from the knees down. Mittens dangled from strings at his/her/its wrists. The child seemed unimpressed by the adults cooing above its head. Johnny thought the poor thing looked miserable dressed for a blizzard on a barely chilly autumn afternoon. It would serve Stillson right if the kid started squalling in the middle of his kiss-the-baby photo op.

    And then Stillson looked up and met Johnny's eye. He saw Stillson laugh and then whisper something behind his hand—mindful not to let the press read his lips saying something impolite—to an aide and the aide looked up and joined him in laughter.

    Johnny tensed and Bruce tugged him back. "Let it go, John. There's nothing you can do here. This isn't the time or place for a brawl. You'll just end up in cuffs and Stillson will walk away smelling like roses. Let it go."

    "Look at the way everyone is looking at him. Shaking hands and kissing babies. Mr. Perfect. He's politically unstoppable. I just wish everyone could see what a dumb jerk he really is. I know it wouldn't do any good, but I'd really like to just knock him right into the mud where he belongs."

    "Johnny, what did you just get finished telling J.J.? If you look like a threat, you might wind up worse than in cuffs. Don't forget that trigger happy lady you were talking about before."

    "She left already."

    "Johnny, that doesn't mean..."

    Johnny slipped his hand into his pocket, touched the sticky plastic gun (his jacket was already stained from the green goo leaking out), and watched the future unfold.

    Judge Pender looked at Johnny over the top of his glasses. "The defendent pleads _nolo contendere_ , which as they say is Latin for 'I didn't do it, your honor, and I promise never to do it again.' Yes?"

    Johnny's lawyer interrupted Johnny before he could reply. "The defendent pleads no contest. That is correct."

    Judge Pender ignored the lawyer and kept looking at Johnny. "Mr. Smith, rumor has it that somewhere in the South American rain forest, there is a remote tribe of indigenous people who have _not_ seen the YouTube video of that little stunt you pulled."

    Johnny bit his lip fiercely to avoid laughing.

    "Mr. Smith, do I detect a trace of smugness on your countenance?"

    Johnny bit his lip harder and shook his head.

    "That would then be the pained expression of remorse, would it?"

    Johnny nodded vehemently and fought every muscle in his face against the snicker building behind it. He couldn't breath and was actually starting to cry.

    "A tear of contrition even?"

    Johnny nodded once, firmly, and risk a jagged inhalation that, indeed, sounded almost like a sob.

    "Mr. Smith, the facts of this case are quite straightforward. I only have one question for you before I pass sentence. What in the hell were your parents thinking when they named you? John Smith. Seriously?"

    Johnny's lawyer had the gift of monotone and answered for him in an unemotional drone. "Mr. Smith's mother had a great fondness for the New Testament and felt that John had a simple elegance."

    "Would that be John like the Gospel According to John or John like John the Baptist?"

    Johnny shook his head helplessly.

    "Both?" the lawyer ventured.

    "Should have named him John-John then. Would have had more character."

    Even the lawyer couldn't think of anything to say to that.

    "Thirty days including time served and twenty hours of community service." He banged the gavel down. "And off the record, Mr. Smith, that was the funniest damn thing I've seen on the Internet since that cat playing the tambourine."

    "Johnny," Bruce warned, tugging him back away from Stillson. "I do not like that look in your eye."

    "It's okay. I just had a vision. I get thirty days plus community service. _Totally_ worth it. Here, hold the pie."

    "What?! Oh, hell no. Johnny, I am not eating this pie by myself. Don't you dare!"

>     He began to grab double handfuls of hot dogs from the cart...threw them into the crowd and went back for more. Hot dogs flew everywhere. "Hot dogs for every man, woman, and child in America! And when you put Greg Stillson in the House of Representatives, you gonna say HOT DOG! SOMEONE GIVES A RIP AT LAST!"  
>      ...  
>      Walter Cronkite came back on in the CBS newsroom, chuckling. "Hot dogs," he said, and chucked again. "And that's the way it is..."  
>     Stephen King,  _The Dead Zone_ , 1979

    Johnny stalked forward and Stillson continued to smirk, until he got a good look at Johnny's face. Then he looked a bit nervous, but instead of signalling to his security—because even Stillson didn't think of Johnny Smith as a threat—he flicked a nervous glance at the press corp around him. He was too far ahead in the polls for anything Johnny said to hurt him. His re-election was a lock at this point. But a politician never likes to be embarrassed. Johnny knew he was smiling like a loon and he watched as Stillson made his decision and pasted his classic politician smile on as he announced, "Look here. It's our old friend Johnny—"

    And then he saw the gun. Semi-automatic pistol. In Johnny's hand it was too light to be real, only half a load of slime left to weigh it down. But from just a few feet away, it looked like the real deal.

    "Smith, are you fucking insane?!" Stillson yelled.

    "Yes." Johnny smiled and raised the gun to the congressman's face.

    There was a strange slow-motion panic. Security was moving in, including Roscoe and the sherrif, but the reporters weren't moving out of the way. People trying to run away collided with people trying to rush forward and everyone was skittering on the muddy leaves—Stillson's aide was the only one who actually landed in the mud—and Stillson himself leaned down and scooped up the little X-Men snowsuit child.

    Johnny experienced a fraction of a second of annoyance. He wanted to slime Stillson right in the kisser. Slime for a slimeball. He didn't want to hit Stillson in the back (where the stain wouldn't show) while he was actually doing something noble like trying to protect a child. He squeezed the trigger as hard as he could, hoping he was close enough to at least get a little of the ooze on the side of Stillson's face. What was the range on alien slime anyway?

    But Stillson did not duck away with the child in his arms. He turned back to Johnny, inexplicably held the child out toward him. Johnny tried to pull back, but it was too late. Green slime was already dribbling down the end of the barrel (not the dramatic sliming Johnny had been hoping for at all) and dripping on the child's snowsuit. A woman screamed.

    "Oh, God!" Johnny sputtered. "I'm so sorry. I'm so sorry." He was sure the child would start sobbing any moment, but instead it just looked at him curiously. This was possibly the most interesting thing that had happened to it all day. "I'll pay for the dry cleaning! If the stains don't come out, I'll buy a new snowsuit!"

    The mother stopped screaming and pushed Johnny out of the way. She tried to grab the child away from Stillson, but hiding out of view of Johnny's gun meant that he was the only one who didn't see the green slime, didn't know the gun wasn't real. He refused to release the child and continued to hold it up in front of him like a shield. The woman yanked on the child again, this time combining it with a savage foot stomp while screaming, "Let go of my baby, you ass!" She grabbed the child and ran.

    Stillson was left wincing and cowering before Johnny and a dozen unforgiving flashbulbs. Roscoe yanked the toy gun out of Johnny's hand and Johnny noticed that Roscoe hadn't even bothered to put down his corndog. "Are you stupid? You confiscate J.J.'s toy gun and then wave it at a congressman? You're an idiot!"

    And then Roscoe turned to Stillson and waved half a corndog-on-a-stick at him. "And you're just a dick! Using a toddler as a human shield?! Seriously?! What is wrong with you?!" (That was officially everyone's favorite part on the YouTube video.)

    Pangborn grabbed Johnny by the back of his collar and dragged him away. Stillson was already trying to make excuses, pretend he was in on the joke, just a little fun, no harm. The woman with the toddler turned back and walked past Johnny towards Stillson. Pangborn wouldn't let go of Johnny enough for him to turn and see, but he heard a very satisfying slap and the word, "Ass!" before seeing her stalk off again.

    "You have the right to remain silent," Pangborn said, "but for the love of God, please tell me what just happened."

    "It's okay," Johnny said. "I saw it in a vision. I knew it was going to turn out all right. I mean, I didn't see the part with the kid, but I saw the part where the judge gave me thirty days and community service, so I knew no one was going to get hurt."

    "A judge is going to let you off with a slap on the wrist for a stunt like that?" Pangborn asked.

>     ...and one with bare knuckes—the latter a case of spouse abuse that had simply gone too far, having only one odd wrinkle to distinguish it: the wife had beaten the husband to death while he was dead drunk, giving back one final apocalyptic tit for almost twenty years of tat. The woman's last set of bruises had still been a good, healthy yellow when she was booked. Pangborn hadn't been a bit sorry when the judge let her off with six months in Women's Correctional followed by six years' probation. Judge Pender had probably done that only because it would have been impolitic to give the lady what she really deserved, which was a medal.  
>     Stephen King,  _The Dark Half_ , 1989

  
    "Judge Pender says it's the funniest video he's seen since that tambourine-playing cat."

    "Oh, I've seen that one," Roscoe said. "He's cute."

    "Roscoe, get him out of here, while I try to hold off the press. And Smith, these visions of yours, they work by touch, right?"

    "Right."

    Pangborn gently placed one finger in the center of Johnny's chest. "Have fun with your thirty days." He then turned back to the chaos in the park.

    Johnny visibly sagged as Roscoe tugged him along. Bruce finally caught up with them.

    "John! Are you okay?!"

    "Pangborn is going to rat me out to the judge for premeditation." He hadn't meant to whine, but even to his own ears it sounded like a whine. "I'm going to get sentenced to the county jail for a year."

    "You're lucky you're not dead! That was the stupidest, stupid stupidity!"

    "You're cute when you're flustered."

    "You understand you are not getting any pie now."

    "A little faster, guys, thank you," Roscoe said, nudging them along. Johnny had seen his patrol vehicle back in the park near the classic cars, but that meant going back through the crowd. Roscoe had apparently decided it was easier to just walk him the four blocks to the nearest police station.

    "Roscoe, you want some pie?" Johnny asked.

    "Johnny, do you understand that you are going to jail?!" Bruce was beside himself. "Actual jail. Not just Cleaves Mills lock up with Otis the drunk. You are going to jail."

    "Yeah, I know."

    Roscoe glanced back to make sure they'd lost all the reporters. Indeed, a full-scale feeding frenzy had Stillson surrounded and no one had shown the slightest interest in following. He took another bite of his corndog and mumbled. "That was one of the ten stupidest things I've seen in my career and I've seen a lot of stupid things."

    "It was worth it."

    "How can you be this calm?!" Bruce yelled.

    "It's not that bad. Jail food is about as bad as advertised, but every Thursday we get pudding and I get two helpings because this drug dealer named Spider always gives me his."

    "Johnny, I do _not_ want to hear about your prison boyfriend."

    "Nah, it's not like that. It's just an offering of gratitude."

    "For embarrassing Stillson?"

    "For saving the world." Johnny smiled. It was no wonder that Pangborn took him for a smug bastard.

    "You saved the world?" Bruce was unconvinced.

    "I saved the world."

    "Just now?"

    "Just now."

    "That stupid stunt? That saved the world?"

    "Yup."

    "Swedish flag?"

    "X-Men snowsuit."

    "Well, when you say it like that," Bruce said, "it's obvious."

    "I should have spotted it earlier," Johnny admitted.

    Bruce suddenly smacked him on the back of the head. " _How the hell did an X-Men snowsuit save the world?! How?!_ "

    "No roughing up the prisoner," Roscoe said as he stopped to throw the stick from his corndog in a trashcan.

    "Didn't you see what happened?"

    "I saw what happened. You went after Stillson with a fake gun and all hell broke loose."

    "Roscoe, tell Bruce what happened."

    "Johnny went after Stillson with a fake gun and Stillson grabbed a toddler as a human shield."

    "The kid in the X-Men snowsuit?"

    "That's the one."

    "Wow." Bruce was momentarily at a loss for words. "Just wow. That's going to ruin Stillson. It has to, right?"

    "'This is on every front page, every blog, every TV news channel. Every standup comedian in the country is going to do a joke about this."

    "Are you _sure_? What if Stillson's people try to put the lid on this?"

    "It's too late. It's already viral. Right now, at this very moment, Jon Stewart is laughing so hard that he's starting to cry."

    "You saved the world." Despite himself, Bruce started to giggle.

    "I saved the world." Johnny laughed and blinked back tears, but he wasn't crying for the same reason Jon Stewart was. Relief washed over him like a physical thing. A million burdens lifted off his shoulders.

    They entered the police station to applause, mostly for Roscoe. (A two-second clip of Roscoe waving a half-eaten corndog at a cringing Greg Stillson while admonishing him, "And you're just a dick!" was on continuous loop on one of the large computer monitors.)

    "I'm sorry, Bruce," Roscoe apologized, "but he's officially in custody now. You've got to come back during visiting hours tomorrow."

    "They're not actually going to keep him for a year? For a toy gun?"

    "Eh, _sentenced_ to a year, maybe, but the jails are too crowded to hang on to him that long for something like this. Good behavior, time served, et cetera, who knows?"

    "I'll get you a lawyer," Bruce said. "We're not relying on Purdy for this. I'm going to find you a _good_ lawyer."

    "I'm going to be fine," Johnny said. "Even if it's the full year, I'll be fine. Really."

    "A good lawyer," Bruce repeated.

    "And when I get out," he leaned in and whispered in Bruce's ear, "we're getting married." He stepped back and patted Bruce on the shoulder. "You've got some time to think about that."

    Roscoe handed Johnny off to one of the station's officers, who motioned him back toward the holding cells. Bruce was left standing there slack-jawed.

    "Wha?"

    "Old and wrinkly and happy!" Johnny shouted before he was tugged out of sight.

* * *

    Johnny was sentenced to a year and served less than two months, but it wasn't good behavior that opened the gates. He volunteered for a work crew because the third worst thing about jail—after the food and the company—was boredom. They were patching up winter potholes when Johnny went down. It was Spider, whom Johnny came to think of not so much as a drug dealer as a junkie who'd moved up the supply chain, who held Johnny's head out of the ice and the road grease while the other prisoners tried to convice the guard he wasn't faking it. It took two more seizures over the course of as many weeks to convince the staff doctor that it was serious enough to turn him over to a real hospital.

    By the time the hospital cut his head open, the jail had decided they didn't have the space anyway and the parole board was happy to cut him loose.

>     Protruding from the surface of the dura was a single blind and malformed human eye. The brain was pulsing slightly. The eye pulsed with it. It looked as if were trying to wink at them.  
>     Stephen King,  _The Dark Half_ , 1989

    He was allowed to speak to his surgeon before agreeing to sign the authorization form and Johnny only had one question for him. Dr. Pritchard was used to odd questions from nervous patients, most of which were, at their heart, variations of "Please reassure me that everything will turn out rosy and perfect," and he answered nearly all of them by saying he was fairly certain things would be worse if they didn't have the surgery. But John Smith's only question had been, "Have you ever found an eyeball inside someone's brain?" He'd been so startled that he told him the truth—which was yes—without wondering first if he should. That sort of thing might upset a skittish patient. However, John Smith didn't even listen to his explanation about a rare case with an eleven year old boy, but just said, "Oh, good, it's not me then," and signed the form.

    Johnny woke up to find that only days had passed this time, not years, and that was the only part that had surprised him. He knew about the tumor and how large it was and how fast it grew. He knew how close it was to the area of his brain that lit up when he had visions and he didn't care when they offered to show him a scan. They told him they couldn't be sure that the cancer wouldn't come back, but he told them it wouldn't. He knew, just like he knew he'd never have another vision again.

    Before the car crash that put him into a coma, Johnny had hunches, got lucky, sometimes knew things without remembering how he knew them, but he didn't understand and didn't think much of it. After the visions ended, Johnny had hunches, got lucky, just knew things sometimes without being able to explain how. This time around though, he understood. He still didn't think much of it, but that was because he didn't have to. That was just the way he was and after the previous few years, it was as close to normal as he could have ever wished for.

    "Tell me the truth, Bruce," he asked. He was sitting on the edge of his hospital bed for the last time on the day he was released. He let Bruce tie his shoes because bending over still made him dizzy.

    Bruce straightened up. "What do you want to know?"

    "How's my hair? Do I look like Bruce Willis working the stubble thing?"

    Bruce closed his eyes and chuckled to himself, shaking his head. "I'll buy you a hat in the gift shop on the way out."

    "That bad?"

    "Sometimes fate's a cruel thing." Bruce patted him on the back as he said the words and Johnny enjoyed the sensation without fear of being jolted into another reality by the contact. "Are you ready?" Bruce asked.

    "There's a whole big, bad world out there. Is anyone ever ready?"

    "It'll be okay," Bruce said.

    Johnny smiled. "I know."

>     "And all of it so corny, nuh? So corny I suppose they would never make a movie or a TV show about it. But nonetheless true." (Dr. Weizak)  
>     Stephen King,  _The Dead Zone_ , 1979


End file.
